The Black Death

“This concept of a corrupted atmosphere, visible in the form of mist or smoke, drifting across the world and overwhelming all whom it encountered, was one of the main assumptions on which the physicians of the Middle Ages based their efforts to check the plague.”

One of the most difficult aspects of dealing with the Black Death was the rudimentary knowledge of disease. If the medical science had been more advanced, perhaps there would have been a way for people to guard themselves against the plague better, but since they had no idea what actually caused and spread the plague, there was little hope of checking its advance.

“Whatever one’s thesis about the inevitability of the Black Death it cannot be denied that it found awaiting it in Europe a population singularly ill-equipped to resist.”

In the middle ages, medical science was in its infancy, public sanitation was largely non-existent, and a host of other factors in health and standards of living made the medieval peasant a ripe for infection as vicious and unforgiving as the Black Death bacterium Y. pestis.

“This description exemplifies the curious blend of sober eyewitness reporting and superstitious fantasy which is characteristic of so many similar chronicles.”

The medieval worldview was characterized by simultaneous naivety and realism—the products of, respectively, the lack of a scientific process and the wealth of lived experience. Honest and remarkably accurate information would be logged alongside fantastical conclusions, with equal weight given to both.